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Try An Easy Mac SSH Shell App

My day job has me wandering the hallowed halls of state government buildings, troubleshooting wayward Windows PCs, Linux servers, and the occasional state sponsored renegade– the Mac.

Through the years I’ve tried nearly every tool known to Mac users to help me connect and work with other platforms. If you use Terminal.app in the Applications > Utilities folder then you know what I mean. For the most part, Terminal works well, but requires plenty of command line knowledge, proper certificate and password management, and a cheat sheet of tricks.

If all you want to do is click to log into a remote server, I recommend the affordable SSH Shell app for your Mac over Terminal. Set up the host, enter the proper credentials, select a color scheme, and logging in from then on is merely a click.

It isn’t so much that SSH Shell is packed with all the geeky features that compete with, say, iTerm 2.x for Mac. It’s not that kind of SSH client. If you’re after quick and easy connectivity with just the right amount of features most of us use, SSH Shell is the one.

Check out how easy it is to get a connection and a screen color you like to use.

What you get with SSH Shell goes beyond what comes with the Mac’s built-in Terminal.app.

Can manage multiple ssh sessions for different servers

Automatically reconnect after disconnected by errors or waking up from sleep

That’s a healthy and useful list that covers everything I do on a mixed platform environment.

Now, just so the geek in you has a place to reside, and because the SSH Shell terminal is so much easier to use and pretty than the vanilla Terminal.app, SSH Shell also works with iTerm 2. It even supports multi-factor authentication methods, and conforms to the standard SSH-2 protocol.

The Manage Hosts window makes a connection as easy as a click. Each host displays the host name, IP address, port number, and the user login, plus a thumbnail of the screen color. That’s another plus. Selecting background theme colors couldn’t be easier, and far faster than Terminal.app.

This is one of those rare Mac apps that’s been around awhile, seems to improve regularly, is both easy to use for the Terminal.app novice but works well with geekier solutions like iTerm 2 for Mac. What I would like to see is a try-before-you-buy option as the price tag is a couple of bucks beyond my throwaway limit.